Parallel Structure

[amitav.parida]

Hi,

Could you please clarify whether the following sentence structure is correct?

When I was in Florida, I ate dates and coconut meat, relaxing in a palm recliner, went to pubs and met my parents.

Here "relaxing" is not parallel to "ate", "went" and "met", but I thought it is supposed to modify "ate" and hence a participle. To me, this meant : while I was relaxing, I ate dates.... But some test takers might treat these actions as independent of each other and seek parallelism in the sentence.

Logically above sentence sounds right to me but a similar structure in a different forum is marked as incorrect.

Please let me know if my understanding is incorrect.

[RonPurewal]

Hi,

Could you please clarify whether the following sentence structure is correct?

When I was in Florida, I ate dates and coconut meat, relaxing in a palm recliner, went to pubs and met my parents.

nope, doesn't work. this is a misuse of the COMMA + -ING construction.
it's not, strictly speaking, ungrammatical - but it doesn't make sense IN CONTEXT.

for the proper CONTEXT in which you have to use COMMA + -ING, see the following thread:
post24246.html#p24246
the rules are probably stricter than you'd thought.

--

one more thing:
you ABSOLUTELY MUST have the COMMA BEFORE THE FINAL "AND" in a SERIES OF 3 OR MORE THINGS.
some other sources (including just about all british / non-american sources) will say that you don't necessarily need this comma, but those sources are irrelevant. the gmat is a dictatorship.

in your example, then, there MUST be a comma between "pubs" & "and met my parents".

finally (and somewhat less importantly), "when i was..." adds nothing of value and so can be omitted.

here's a better way to write this sentence:
In Florida, I ate dates and coconut meat while relaxing in a palm recliner, went to pubs, and met my parents.